“So don’t do it,” said Wang-mu. “If you don’t want to be those things, don’t do them.”
He sighed and closed his eyes. “If you’re so bright, why haven’t you understood a word I’ve said?”
She did understand, though. “What is your will, anyway? Nobody can see it. You don’t hear it thinking. You only know what your will is afterward, when you look back in your life and see what you’ve done.”
“That’s the most terrible trick he’s played on me,” said Peter softly, his eyes still closed. “I look back on my life and I see only the memories he has imagined for me. He was taken from our family when he was only five. What does he know of me or my life?”
“He wrote The Hegemon.”
“That book. Yes, based on Valentine’s memories, as she told them to him. And the public documents of my dazzling career. And of course the few ansible communications between Ender and my own late self before I—he—died. I’m only a few weeks old, yet I know a quotation from Henry IV, Part I. Owen Glendower boasting to Hotspur. Henry Percy. How could I know that? When did I go to school? How long did I lie awake at night, reading old plays until I committed a thousand favorite lines to memory? Did Ender somehow conjure up the whole of his dead brother’s education? All his private thoughts? Ender only knew the real Peter Wiggin for five years. It’s not a real person’s memories I draw on. It’s the memories Ender thinks that I should have.”
“He thinks you should know Shakespeare, and so you do?” she asked doubtfully.
“If only Shakespeare were all he had given me. The great writers, the great philosophers. If only those were the only memories I had.”
She waited for him to list the troublesome memories. But he only shuddered and fell silent.
“So if you are really controlled by Ender, then . . . you are him. Then that is yourself. You are Andrew Wiggin. You have an aiúa.”
“I’m Andrew Wiggin’s nightmare,” said Peter. “I’m Andrew Wiggin’s self-loathing. I’m everything he hates and fears about himself. That’s the script I’ve been given. That’s what I have to do.”
He flexed his hand into a fist, then extended it partway, the fingers still bent. A claw. The tiger again. And for a moment, Wang-mu was afraid of him. Only a moment, though. He relaxed his hands. The moment passed. “What part does your script have in it for me?”
“I don’t know,” said Peter. “You’re very smart. Smarter than I am, I hope. Though of course I have such incredible vanity that I can’t really believe that anyone is actually smarter than I am. Which means that I’m all the more in need of good advice, since I can’t actually conceive of needing any.”
“You talk in circles.”
“That’s just part of my cruelty. To torment you with conversation. But maybe it’s supposed to go farther than that. Maybe I’m supposed to torture you and kill you the way I so clearly remember doing with squirrels. Maybe I’m supposed to stake your living body out in the woods, nailing your extremities to tree roots, and then open you up layer by layer to see at what point the flies begin to come and lay eggs in your exposed flesh.”
She recoiled at the image. “I have read the book. I know the Hegemon was not a monster!”
“It wasn’t the Speaker for the Dead who created me Outside. It was the frightened boy Ender. I’m not the Peter Wiggin he so wisely understood in that book. I’m the Peter Wiggin he had nightmares about. The one who flayed squirrels.”
“He saw you do that?” she asked.
“Not me,” he said testily. “And no, he never even saw him do it. Valentine told him later. She found the squirrel’s body in the woods near their childhood home in Greensboro, North Carolina, on the continent of North America back on Earth. But that image fit so tidily into his nightmares that he borrowed it and shared it with me. That’s the memory I live with. Intellectually, I can imagine that the real Peter Wiggin was probably not cruel at all. He was learning and studying. He didn’t have compassion for the squirrel because he didn’t sentimentalize it. It was simply an animal. No more important than a head of lettuce. To cut it up was probably as immoral an act as making a salad. But that’s not how Ender imagined it, and so that’s not how I remember it.”
“How do you remember it?”
“The way I remember all my supposed memories. From the outside. Watching myself in horrified fascination as I take a fiendish delight in cruelty. All my memories prior to the moment I came to life on Ender’s little voyage Outside, in all of them I see myself through someone else’s eyes. A very odd feeling, I assure you.”
“But now?”
“Now I don’t see myself at all,” he said. “Because I have no self. I am not myself.”
“But you remember. You have memories. Of this conversation, already you remember it. Looking at me. You must, surely.”
“Yes,” he said. “I remember you. And I remember being here and seeing you. But there isn’t any self behind my eyes. I feel tired and stupid even when I’m being my most clever and brilliant.”
He smiled a charming smile and now Wang-mu could see again the true difference between Peter and the hologram of the Hegemon. It was as he said: Even at his most self-deprecating, this Peter Wiggin had eyes that flashed with inner rage. He was dangerous. You could see it looking at him. When he looked into your eyes, you could imagine him planning how and when you would die.
“I am not myself,” said Peter.
“You are saying this to control yourself,” said Wang-mu, guessing but also sure she was right. “This is your incantation, to stop yourself from doing what you desire.”
Peter sighed and leaned over, laying his head down on the terminal, his ear pressed against the cold plastic surface.
“What is it you desire?” she said, fearful of the answer.
“Go away,” he said.
“Where can I go? This great starship of yours has only one room.”
“Open the door and go outside,” he said.
“You mean to kill me? To eject me into space where I’ll freeze before I have time to suffocate?”
He sat up and looked at her in puzzlement. “Space?”
His confusion confused her. Where else would they be but in space? That’s where starships went, through space.
Except this one, of course.
As he saw understanding come to her, he laughed aloud. “Oh, yes, you’re the brilliant one, they’ve remade the entire world of Path to have your genius!”
She refused to be goaded.
“I thought there would be some sensation of movement. Or something. Have we traveled, then? Are we already there?”
“In the twinkling of an eye. We were Outside and then back Inside at another place, all so fast that only a computer could experience our voyage as having any duration at all. Jane did it before I finished talking to her. Before I said a word to you.”
“Then where are we? What’s outside the door?”
“We’re sitting in the woods somewhere on the planet Divine Wind. The air is breathable. You won’t freeze. It’s summer outside the door.”
She walked to the door and pulled down the handle, releasing the airtight seal. The door eased open. Sunlight streamed into the room.
“Divine Wind,” she said. “I read about it—it was founded as a Shinto world the way Path was supposed to be Taoist. The purity of ancient Japanese culture. But I think it’s not so very pure these days.”
“More to the point, it’s the world where Andrew and Jane and I felt—if one can speak of my having feelings apart from Ender’s own—the world where we might find the center of power in the worlds ruled by Congress. The true decision makers. The power behind the throne.”
“So you can subvert them and take over the human race?”
“So I can stop the Lusitania Fleet. Taking over the human race is a bit later on the agenda. The Lusitania Fleet is something of an emergency. We have only a few weeks to stop it before the fleet gets there and uses the Little Doctor, the M.D. Device, to b
low Lusitania into its constituent elements. In the meantime, because Ender and everyone else expects me to fail, they’re building these little tin can starships as fast as possible and transporting as many Lusitanians as they can—humans, piggies, and buggers—to other habitable but as yet uninhabited planets. My dear sister Valentine—the young one—is off with Miro—in his fresh new body, the dear lad—searching out new worlds as fast as their little starship can carry them. Quite a project. All of them betting on my—on our—failure. Let’s disappoint them, shall we?”
“Disappoint them?”
“By succeeding. Let’s succeed. Let’s find the center of power among humankind, and let’s persuade them to stop the fleet before it needlessly destroys a world.”
Wang-mu looked at him doubtfully. Persuade them to stop the fleet? This nasty-minded, cruel-hearted boy? How could he persuade anyone of anything?
As if he could hear her thoughts, he answered her silent doubt. “You see why I invited you to come along with me. When Ender was inventing me, he forgot the fact that he never knew me during the time in my life when I was persuading people and gathering them together in shifting alliances and all that nonsense. So the Peter Wiggin he created is far too nasty, openly ambitious, and nakedly cruel to persuade a man with rectal itch to scratch his own butt.”
She looked away from him again.
“You see?” he said. “I offend you again and again. Look at me. Do you see my dilemma? The real Peter, the original one, he could have done the work I’ve been sent to do. He could have done it in his sleep. He’d already have a plan. He’d be able to win people over, soothe them, insinuate himself into their councils. That Peter Wiggin! He can charm the stings out of bees. But can I? I doubt it. For, you see, I’m not myself.”
He got up from his chair, roughly pushed his way past her, and stepped outside onto the meadow that surrounded the little metal cabin that had carried them from world to world. Wang-mu stood in the doorway, watching him as he wandered away from the ship; away, but not too far.
I know something of how he feels, she thought. I know something of having to submerge your will in someone else’s. To live for them, as if they were the star of the story of your life, and you merely a supporting player. I have been a slave. But at least in all that time I knew my own heart. I knew what I truly thought even as I did what they wanted, whatever it took to get what I wanted from them. Peter Wiggin, though, has no idea of what he really wants, because even his resentment of his lack of freedom isn’t his own, even that comes from Andrew Wiggin. Even his self-loathing is Andrew’s self-loathing, and . . .
And back and back, in circles, like the random path he was tracing through the meadow.
Wang-mu thought of her mistress—no, her former mistress—Qing-jao. She also traced strange patterns. It was what the gods forced her to do. No, that’s the old way of thinking. It’s what her obsessive-compulsive disorder caused her to do. To kneel on the floor and trace the grain of the wood in each board, trace a single line of it as far as it went across the floor, line after line. It never meant anything, and yet she had to do it because only by such meaningless mind-numbing obedience could she win a scrap of freedom from the impulses controlling her. It is Qing-jao who was always the slave, and never me. For the master that ruled her controlled her from inside her own mind. While I could always see my master outside me, so my inmost self was never touched.
Peter Wiggin knows that he is ruled by the unconscious fears and passions of a complicated man many lightyears away. But then, Qing-jao thought her obsessions came from the gods. What does it matter, to tell yourself that the thing controlling you comes from outside, if in fact you only experience it inside your own heart? Where can you run from it? How can you hide? Qing-jao must be free by now, freed by the carrier virus that Peter brought with him to Path and put into the hands of Han Fei-tzu. But Peter—what freedom can there be for him?
And yet he must still live as if he were free. He must still struggle for freedom even if the struggle itself is just one more symptom of his slavery. There is a part of him that yearns to be himself. No, not himself. A self.
So what is my part in all of this? Am I supposed to work a miracle, and give him an aiúa? That isn’t in my power.
And yet I do have power, she thought.
She must have power, or why else had he spoken to her so openly? A total stranger, and he had opened his heart to her at once. Why? Because she was in on the secrets, yes, but something else as well.
Ah, of course. He could speak freely to her because she had never known Andrew Wiggin. Maybe Peter was nothing but an aspect of Ender’s nature, all that Ender feared and loathed about himself. But she could never compare the two of them. Whatever Peter was, whoever controlled him, she was his confidante.
Which made her, once again, someone’s servant. She had been Qing-jao’s confidante, too.
She shuddered, as if to shake from her the sad comparison. No, she told herself. It is not the same thing. Because that young man wandering so aimlessly among the wildflowers has no power over me, except to tell me of his pain and hope for my understanding. Whatever I give to him I will give freely.
She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the frame of the door. I will give it freely, yes, she thought. But what am I planning to give him? Why, exactly what he wants—my loyalty, my devotion, my help in all his tasks. To submerge myself in him. And why am I already planning to do all this? Because however he might doubt himself, he has the power to win people to his cause.
She opened her eyes again and strode out into the hip-high grass toward him. He saw her and waited wordlessly as she approached. Bees buzzed around her; butterflies staggered drunkenly through the air, avoiding her somehow in their seemingly random flight. At the last moment she reached out and gathered a bee from a blossom into her hand, into her fist, but then quickly, before it could sting her, she lobbed it into Peter’s face.
Flustered, surprised, he batted away the infuriated bee, ducked under it, dodged, and finally ran a few steps before it lost track of him and buzzed its way out among the flowers again. Only then could he turn furiously to face her.
“What was that for!”
She giggled at him—she couldn’t help it. He had looked so funny.
“Oh, good, laugh. I can see you’re going to be fine company.”
“Be angry, I don’t care,” said Wang-mu. “I’ll just tell you this. Do you think that away off on Lusitania, Ender’s aiúa suddenly thought, ‘Ho, a bee!’ and made you brush at it and dodge it like a clown?”
He rolled his eyes. “Oh, aren’t you clever. Well gosh, Miss Royal Mother of the West, you sure solved all my problems! I can see I must always have been a real boy! And these ruby shoes, why, they’ve had the power to take me back to Kansas all along!”
“What’s Kansas?” she asked, looking down at his shoes, which were not red.
“Just another memory of Ender’s that he kindly shared with me,” said Peter Wiggin.
He stood there, his hands in his pockets, regarding her.
She stood just as silently, her hands clasped in front of her, regarding him right back.
“So are you with me?” he finally asked.
“You must try not to be nasty with me,” she said.
“Take that up with Ender.”
“I don’t care whose aiúa controls you,” she said. “You still have your own thoughts, which are different from his—you feared the bee, and he didn’t even think of a bee right then, and you know it. So whatever part of you is in control or whoever the real ‘you’ happens to be, right there on the front of your head is the mouth that’s going to be speaking to me, and I’m telling you that if I’m going to work with you, you better be nice to me.”
“Does this mean no more bee fights?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“That’s just as well. With my luck Ender no doubt gave me a body that goes into shock when I’m stung by a bee.”
; “It can also be pretty hard on the bee,” she said.
He grinned at her. “I find myself liking you,” he said. “I really hate that.”
He strode off toward the starship. “Come on!” he called out to her. “Let’s see what information Jane can give us about this world we’re supposed to take by storm.”
2
“YOU DON’T BELIEVE IN GOD”
“When I follow the path of the gods through the wood,
My eyes take every twisting turn of the grain,
But my body moves straight along the planking,
So those who watch me see that the path of the gods is straight,
While I dwell in a world with no straightness in it.”
from The God Whispers of Han Qing-jao
Novinha would not come to him. The gentle old teacher looked genuinely distressed as she told Ender. “She wasn’t angry,” the old teacher explained. “She told me that . . .”
Ender nodded, understanding how the teacher was torn between compassion and honesty. “You can tell me her words,” he said. “She is my wife, so I can bear it.”
The old teacher rolled her eyes. “I’m married too, you know.”
Of course he knew. All the members of the Order of the Children of the Mind of Christ—Os Filhos da Mente de Cristo—were married. It was their rule.
“I’m married, so I know perfectly well that your spouse is the one person who knows all the words you can’t bear to hear.”
“Then let me correct myself,” said Ender mildly. “She is my wife, so I am determined to hear it, whether I can bear it or not.”
“She says that she has to finish the weeding, so she has no time for lesser battles.”
Yes, that sounded like Novinha. She might tell herself that she had taken the mantle of Christ upon her, but if so it was the Christ who denounced the Pharisees, the Christ who said all those cruel and sarcastic things to his enemies and his friends alike, not the gentle one with infinite patience.
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